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carcon Salary Negotiation

A person with some fixed 'value' X can be worth much higher to one company than some other company. In fact that is extremely common. Value is relative here so I completely disagree with your "a professional knows their value" sentiment.

carcon I went to the hospital to give birth and tested positive for meth

I've heard the exact same argument from an anti-vaccer :)

carcon I went to the hospital to give birth and tested positive for meth

Sometimes I think that the HN crowd is less prone to very non-scientific biases than the general public, or a place where I'm less likely to see people throwing around things that sound like facts that are mostly psuedo-science. Then threads like this happen.

carcon Medical error in hospitals is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

Why is this being downvoted?

carcon Being a Developer After 40

I am not in SV (but still on the West coast) and I know several software engineers making more than 200k/year. That includes stock grants, because it's ridiculous not to when the stock is in a public company and can be immediately turned into cash.

carcon Boaty McBoatface and the False Promise of Democracy

Not supporting OP but their question is not at all a dichotomy. The question wasn't should everything have a whimsical name or should nothing have a whimsical name. The question was basically just should everything have a whimsical name. Sounds like your answer is no, because you're ok with things having whimsical names sometimes.

carcon Tech Companies Face Greater Scrutiny for Paying Workers with Stock

You can't have it both ways people - when a company strikes it rich people complain that the regular employees didn't get a big enough piece o the pie. When companies do poorly, people complain that the employees totally got screwed because their equity is worth nothing now.

You either can get paid in pure salary and have a lower ceiling (because you're paying for less risk) and then be left out when the company does well. Or you can get some stock with a higher ceiling/lower floor and be screwed if the company goes down the drain. Either way you're not forced to take equity... developers are in demand.

This is before even considering about trying to align interests of the employee with the company..

carcon My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

At the big 4 firm I was at, I can say positively that total partner compensation did not start out anywhere close to 1 million/year

carcon My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

"look, you make as much as we'll pay just-a-programmer, even an architect, here."

Sorry but this line is almost always complete BS. Anyone that I know who has heard this line, gone out and gotten a (much better) offer somewhere else, and the original company instantly matched. Like, without even having to consult anyone, their manager said they'd match. You can't trust this line.

carcon My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

Anecdotal, but I am not exagerrating when I say about a quarter of the developers I'm friends with (i.e. hang out with outside of work) make substantially more than a new partner at a big firm.

Source: They discussed their negotiations with me so I know their compensation, and I used to work as a CPA at one of the big 4

carcon My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

You should try something new. Try a startup or perhaps just something smaller where you have to wear a lot of hats and be included in decision making and such. I can't relate to your experience at all

carcon Oculus Rift Review: VR’s Rising Star Isn’t Ready for the Mainstream

I've heard the PS VR is very lacking. Source: http://www.gizmag.com/best-vr-headset-gdc-2016/42377/

carcon Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley

Actually, assuming you're not just maintaining a code base (i.e. you're mostly adding features or making something new), the cost of software development is typically an asset on the balance sheet

carcon Firearms vs. Intentional Homicide

It doesn't help that the government is literally disallowed from funding any gun related medical research. My girlfriend does rural health related research and this fact always infuriates her - I never even knew this until she had explained it to me.

carcon Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

How is Microsoft extinguishing Skype? I've seen no such evidence personally

carcon AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep

I'm having a hard time finding the "sleep phones" by any brand named Took that you referred to. Would you mind sharing a link to them?

carcon Uber's Design Meltdown

I've never, ever in my life seen a rebranding or redesign that wasn't widely complained about. How can we differentiate between this kneejerk reaction that all humans seem to have to changes in a UI/design they are already familiar with, and actually bad redesigns/rebrandings?

carcon Justin Kan Is Hiring Someone to Revive Justin.tv on Snapchat

What's his snapchat name? Don't see it mentioned and failed to find it after spending 20 seconds of googling.

Edit: Found it - it's justinkan (Guess I coulda guessed that)

carcon My Little Sister Taught Me How to “Snapchat Like the Teens”

You're right, I could've been more specific - they definitely need to sit somewhere if the destination phone isn't on the network or something, but they are deleted once viewed or some timeout has been reached. This of course also doesn't consider ways that the destination phone could store the photo (screen shot or something). But as far as snapchat is concerned, it's gone.

carcon My Little Sister Taught Me How to “Snapchat Like the Teens”

Stop pretending you know what you're talking about. Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures? Snapchat handles more pictures per day than facebook[0], which gets almost half a billion per day. I know a few snapchat engineers that concur that Snapchat really does not keep any pictures, which allows them to make interesting optimizations that Facebook (and similar) can't.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/snapchat-reportedly-sees-mo...

carcon The crash of 2016?

I find all the economic prodigies here entertaining. People who's day job is to predict this stuff can't even make good predictions. I guess I never knew that techies were better economists than the economists

carcon Quality is too important to be left to QA engineers

There will never be a way to test everything in an automated fashion. For those you can either have your expensive software engineers to painstakingly run very scenario regarding a change, or have a less expensive QA person do this. I guess it's management's call, but for large, complex systems it can take days to go through the scenarios for some some bug fixes - and those are days not spent fixing other bugs or adding features.

That being said, I definitely think software engineers should be writing the unit tests and automating as much as they can - it's just that you can't automate everything.

carcon “No Cost” License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Debt Collectors

"We’re unlikely to get answers from the government agencies who signed these contracts. To access Vigilant’s powerful online data systems, agencies agree not to disparage the company or even to talk to the press without the company’s permission"

How is it possibly legal for a government, which is supposed to be transparent, to contract with a private company and accept a term saying they cannot talk about the private company without company approval?

carcon Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

Glad I'm not the only person who felt this frustration..

carcon EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government

I've always felt the exact same way. I can rarely get through anything they send me because my natural reaction is to trust what I'm reading LESS when the writing is in that tone.

carcon Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version

> Literally nobody is arguing for that. That's a humongous straw man, it's the same straw man pg used in his original article, and it's complete nonsense. "Reduce income inequality" does not mean eliminate all income inequality.

So you seem to agree that income inequality can be a good thing. If you didn't, you'd want everyone to have the same income. Maybe I misunderstood PG's essay, but the main takeaway I got was that income inequality CAN be a good thing for a society, and that the income inequality caused by successful startups are not an important enough problem (if it is even a problem) to society for us to try to focus on it.

carcon Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version

Startups aren't good because they create income inequality. Income inequality being possible is good because it provides the incentives for people to take risks and create startups. That isn't to say the current level of income inequality we see today is good - it isn't. But to get rid of income inequality completely would drastically reduce the number of startups because - what would be the point?

Would you really rather have everyone make the same amount of income regardless of what they do?

carcon Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version

I don't really see how this is controversial. Do you want to reward talented people who work hard? Do you want to incentivize people to do great things? You need to allow some level of income inequality. The extreme level of income inequality we see now is a bad thing.. but that doesn't mean economic inequality is inherently bad. Most good things taken to an extreme cease to remain good things.

carcon Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

I don't either... assuming the author discloses the sources of funding. How can you rationalize away that part?

carcon Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

To all the people that are somehow saying that this isn't all that bad, you seem to be missing the point. The problem isn't that these professors are taking money to support something they already support. It's that they are taking money and then going to lengths to avoid disclosing the funding OR to make it look like their papers went through a real peer review process...

I'm utterly shocked and disappointed by how many people on here are saying things along the lines of "what's the big deal?"